“Renoir”: A Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man

Andrée Heuschling (Christa Théret), a full-bodied young woman with a perverse twist to her mouth, enters the estate of the elderly Auguste Renoir (Michel Bouquet), in 1915, seeking work as a model. The camera flows behind her as she passes through olive trees and makes her way to the sizable house in Cagnes-sur-Mer, not far from the Mediterranean, in the sunshiny, breezy, Edenic south of France where so many painters—Cézanne, Picasso, Braque—spent time or ended their days. Gilles Bourdos’s new film, “Renoir,” is openly a celebration of sensuous ease and calm. It’s an idyllic, low-intensity movie set in what appears, literally and symbolically, to be the last bastion of the nineteenth century, whose bourgeois pleasures Renoir celebrated in innumerable paintings throughout his life.

Only a few hundred miles to the north, the Great War grinds on, and millions of young men are getting chewed up, including two of Renoir’s sons, Pierre and Jean (Vincent Rottiers), who both luckily would survive wounds and go on to have long careers—Pierre as an actor in the theatre; Jean, of course, as a great movie director. Renoir himself hates the war and pointedly ignores it, devoting himself to the rounded pink female nudes that dominated his late style. Female beauty is his protest, his refuge, his sanity, and Andrée becomes his last model and muse (she’s the woman, considerably plumped, who appears in “The Bathers” and other late works). She is also irresistible to the young Jean, who’s on medical leave from the front. The two men don’t fight over her—the movie is not, as some have said, an “Oedipal drama.” But they both relish her sexually—for Auguste as inspiration; for Jean, as bedmate (and also, later, as inspiration, too).

The heart of this gentle work is a very convincing and detailed portrait of the artist as an old man. The entire household is organized around Renoir, a gruff, at times wordless force of will, who is fixed on his work. Five or six women cook for him, carry him up and down a hill to his studio, bathe him, put him to bed. Renoir has painful rheumatoid arthritis; his hands are a knobby mess, and the paintbrush has to be strapped into his right hand. Some of the women are former models and lovers now willingly relegated to the domestic staff. As far as we can tell, they regard their work as a privilege, as part of a great career in art, gathering up the long achievement of the past even as it plows against the wind into the future. The movie radiates what might be called the glow of a demanding and benevolent patriarchal order.

Michel Bouquet, who is in his mid-eighties, has been acting for over half a century. He has a shaved head, a short white beard, and a harsh voice. He gives a very powerful performance of a man fortified by stoical courage and swathed in vanity—screaming in protest, for instance, when Jean sees him naked in his bath with three women in attendance. The relation between the two men is guarded, wary, and often silent, which may well have been the truth but prevents the movie from coming to much more than a simmer. Auguste Renoir doesn’t have a clue as to his son’s possible talent—and not much interest in it either—but, then, the movie doesn’t offer much evidence of Jean’s later greatness. He might be any sweet-tempered young soldier of the period. If that’s the ironic point, Bourdos doesn’t make much of it. What, exactly, did Jean Renoir learn from his father? Yes, we can see some of it in his films, but Bourdos makes him overawed as a young man, an observer sitting by his father quietly, mixing paints or just watching. Bourdos may have wanted to avoid obviousness or vulgarity, but his reticence could be fear, too. Jean’s silence is touching but it leaves a hole in the movie.

What interests Bourdos are Auguste Renoir’s abrupt and lordly ways, his domination of the many women around him even in his disabled state. “The flesh is all that matters,” he says—the flesh of young women, whose skin he makes so palpable that people will want to reach out and touch it. (The celebrated forger Guy Ribes, just out of prison, actually does the brushstrokes; we see only his hand.) As Bourdos tells it, the spun-sugar late style—disliked for years but now, perhaps, coming into fashion—is an old man’s last, greedy assertion of life, a triumph over infirmity and pain as well as the war. We’re meant to accept his selfish habits, which are probably not very different from those of successful artists now, as well as in the past. Artists, including novelists and poets, almost always acquire someone whose strength they lean on, even sap. At least Renoir, as far as we can tell, did not destroy anyone.

Christa Théret’s Andrée does what Renoir asks, lying on a couch or outdoors, spreading herself out with just a cloth draped over her midsection, happy to be looked at and lusted after. But she wants respect, too, and is quick to turn on anyone who doesn’t give it to her. Insolent and self-willed, she demands to be paid properly and refuses to join the domestic entourage in the house, smashing plates on the floor in a rage. Théret could be the next Isabelle Huppert; she has that kind of rude directness and strength. She’s the twentieth-century woman within a nineteenth-century body—enraged spirit seething within indolent flesh.

Her Andrée astonishes the sweet-faced and diffident young Jean. Missing the comrades he left behind at the front, he returns, for a while, to the war, this time as a flyer, but the story ends well. Earlier, on leave, Jean buys a one-reel film from a traveling peddler, and shows it to a group that is astonished by the huge closeups—a group including his father. The old century of glorious painting gives way to the literalness of photography—though in Jean Renoir’s case, photography marked by the lyricism and fullness of life that his father gloried in. Jean Renoir married Andrée, who became Catherine Hessling, the actress with bee-stung lips appearing in five of his silent movies, including “Nana” in 1926. As the movie has it, his sexual enthrallment, and his desire to do something for the tough, demanding girl, pulled him out of passivity and silence, and led him into movies. The year of their marriage, 1919, is also the year of Auguste Renoir’s death, and it’s hard not to see his old man’s end and his wife’s imperious will as twin doors flung open to the future.

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